Tomorrow marks the start of a new eight-week term at Accella and we’ve got a surprise in store for our students: new seating! We’ve replaced our longstanding classroom layout, a system of large work tables and four-legged chairs, with individual wheeled seats and worksurfaces (Node chairs from Steelcase).

We live in an era in which it seems that nearly everyone is doing their darnedest to “nudge” us and even something as superficially unimportant as the color of the walls in a room is believed to have a significant cognitive effects (see Blue or red? Exploring the effect of color on cognitive task performances. by Mehta and Zhu, 2009), so a transformation of this magnitude in a learning environment like the one that we provide at Accella seems guaranteed to spur changes in student interactions and performance.

In other words, we’re pleased as punch with the new seating arrangements and are looking forward to observing the positive knock-on effects that we anticipate they’ll have in our classes!